Reagan’s Lessons for Dealing with Russia

President Reagan was holding a meeting in the Cabinet Room on March 25, 1985, when Press Secretary Larry Speakes came over to me, as communications director, with a concern. The White House was about to issue a statement on the killing of Major Arthur Nicholson, a U.S. army officer serving in East Germany. Maj. Nicholson had been shot in cold blood by a Russian soldier. Speakes thought the president’s statement, “This violence was unjustified,” was weak. I agreed. We interrupted the president, who reread the statement, then said go ahead with it.

What lay behind this Reagan decision not to express his own and his nation’s disgust and anger at this atrocity? Since taking office, Reagan had sought to engage Soviet leaders in negotiations, but, as he told me, “they keep dying on me.” Two weeks earlier, on March 10, 1985, Konstantin Chernenko, the third Soviet premier in Reagan’s term, had died, and the youngest member of the Politburo, Mikhail Gorbachev, had been named to succeed him. Believing Gorbachev had no role in the murder of Maj. Nicholson, and seeking a summit with the new Soviet leader to ease Cold War tensions, Reagan decided not to express what must have been in his heart.

Which raises a question many Republicans are asking: What would Reagan do—in Syria, Crimea, Ukraine? Is Sen. Rand Paul or Ted Cruz, or Gov. Jeb Bush or Chris Christie the candidate most in the Reagan tradition, the gold standard for the GOP? We cannot know what he would do, as we live in a post-Cold War world. But we do know what Reagan did. In the battle over the Panama Canal “giveaway,” Reagan stood against Bill Buckley and much of his movement and party. “We bought it, we paid for it, it’s ours, and we’re gonna keep it,” he thundered.

The Senate agreed 2-1 with Jimmy Carter to surrender the Canal to Panama’s dictator. Reagan’s consolation prize? The presidency. Reagan came to office declaring Vietnam “a noble cause” and determined to rebuild U.S. military might and morale, which he did in spades. His defense budgets broke the spine of a Soviet Union that could not compete with the booming America of the Reagan era. What’s our strategy, his first National Security Council adviser Dick Allen asked him. Replied Reagan: “We win, they lose.” Reagan saw clearly the crucial moral dimension of the ideological struggle between communism and freedom. He called the Soviet Bloc “an evil empire.”

Yet he never threatened military intervention in Eastern Europe, as some bellicose Republicans do today. Reagan would not be rattling sabers over Crimea or Ukraine.

When Gen. Jaruzelski’s regime smashed Solidarity on Moscow’s orders, Reagan refused to put Warsaw in default on its debts. But he did deny Moscow the U.S. technology to build its Yamal pipeline to Europe. Given Europe’s dependency today on Russian gas, a wise decision. When the Soviets deployed triple-warhead intermediate-range missiles in Eastern Europe, the SS-20, Reagan countered with nuclear-armed Pershing II and cruise missiles in Western Europe. Only when Gorbachev agreed to take down all the SS-20s, did Reagan agree to bring the Pershings and cruise missiles home. When Gadhafi blew up a Berlin discotheque full of U.S. soldiers in retaliation for the Sixth Fleet’s downing of two Libyan warplanes, Reagan sent F-111s in a reprisal raid that almost killed Gadhafi.
Ronald Reagan believed in the measured response.

He hated nuclear weapons, “those god-awful things,” he used to say, and seized on the idea of a missile defense, SDI. And while he was ready to trade down offensive missiles, when Gorbachev at Reykjavik demanded he throw the Strategic Defense Initiative into the pot, Reagan got up and walked out. Would Reagan go into Syria? Almost surely not.
On the last day of his presidency, he told aides the worst mistake he made was putting U.S. Marines into Lebanon, where 241 Americans perished in the terror bombing of the Beirut barracks.

He had no problem working with flawed regimes, as long as they stood with us in the cause that would decide the fate of mankind. The East-West struggle was the top priority with Ronald Reagan, which is one reason he vetoed sanctions on South Africa. Whatever her sins, Pretoria was on our side in the main event. But while Reagan would not challenge Moscow militarily in Central Europe, he provided weapons to anti-Communist guerrillas and freedom fighters in Afghanistan, Angola and Nicaragua to bleed and break the Soviet Empire at its periphery and make them pay the same price we paid in Vietnam.

Reagan was an anti-Communist to his core, having fought them in the Screen Actors Guild in the 1940s. But he was never anti-Russian, and wanted always to keep the channels open. He ended his presidency as he had hoped, being cheered while strolling through Red Square with Mikhail Gorbachev.

Ronald Reagan never wanted to be a war president, and there were no wars on Reagan’s watch. None. The Gipper was no neocon.

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8 Responses to Reagan’s Lessons for Dealing with Russia

What would be a better point would be the story that when Israel was shelling the Palestinians, Reagan supposedly got the Israeli Prime Minister on the phone and chewed him out till the shelling was stopped. We could use that today.

Could it be that Reagan was from a pre-Boomer generation, and thus much more realistic? Seems to me that the Boomers have wanted to dream big dreams, no matter how unrealistic, since their youth in the 1960s. It is my opinion that their pie-in-the-sky fantasies – political, cultural, and economical – are bringing America to its knees (because they refuse to change course).
Cruz and Rubio are Generation X disciples of this “irrational exuberance.” We really need to vote in more Gen X and Millennials with a different mindset. Tired of this country being held hostage by these 50 year old failed ideas, especially neoconservatism. History isn’t going to be kind to the people who have been in charge for the past 25 years.

The Orange Revolution in the fall of 2004 produced an inept leader, Viktor Yushchenko, and a corrupt operator, Yulia Tymoshenko, whose incompetence paved the way for Viktor Yanukovych’s victory in January 2010. He also proved to be just as incompetent and corrupt, but in the end he was a legal president.
Western powers stage-managed, funded and aided the violent overthrow of a
democratically elected chief of state in February. We will now reap the
rewards: a bankrupt economy in immediate need of some tens of billions of ready
liquidity, a disintegrating country with secessionist regions that can hardly
be controlled short of a civil war, and a new Cold War-like flashpoint that
nobody needs.
Playing geopolitical games in Ukraine undoubtedly pleases some Eastern Europeans who have their own axes to grind, but it jeopardizes the prospects for long-term peace in Eastern Europe. The United States should understand why the people in western Ukraine have a vested interest, and psychological need, to treat Russia as the enemy; but America should never allow herself to be seduced by their hatreds and obsessions.
Equating “the people of Ukraine” with the helmeted nationalists at Maidan would be a major mistake. Their nationalism is itself a hybrid phenomenon that only
matured in the Polish-ruled Volhynia and Galicia between the two world wars. Its capital is in Lvov, a predominantly Polish city until it was irreversibly changed by the genocidal Banderists during the war and by Stalin’s commissars thereafter.
Ukraine’s eastern border, on the other hand, was arbitrarily drawn in 1922 by mostly non-Russian Bolsheviks hell-bent on reducing Russia in size. It includes large areas and population centers that have no historic or cultural connection to Ukraine. Last but not least, the Crimean Peninsula was transferred to Ukraine from Russia by a stroke of Nikita Khrushchev’s drunken pen in February 1954. There is nothing sacred and nothing permanent about these absurd Soviet borders. Any attempt to uphold them with the force of arms and treaties will lead to bloodshed, as Tito’s equally arbitrarily drawn internal boundaries did in
ex-Yugoslavia two decades ago.
It is insane for the United States to assume responsibility over a host of disputed frontiers that were drawn arbitrarily by Soviet Communists.The United States must not extend her protective cover into Russia’s backyard to new clients whose fortunes are not vital to this country’s interests.. The expansionist obsessions please Eastern European client states but are detrimental to the security of the United States. The bottom line is NATO enlargement has only ensured that Russian missiles remain targeted on American cities.

Philo: you are right. The US and NATO endeavor to encircle, isolate, humiliate, and provoke Russia at every turn.

Our government and “allied” governments are no longer defending against Russian encroachment on non-Russian peoples; they are presuming to dictate that essentially Russian people cannot be allowed to join or return to their kindred homeland.

I don’t trust the Putin regime or Russians generally. But that doesn’t give us a right to interfere and condemn (hypocritically) like we are doing. Ukraine is not Poland. Part of current Ukraine ought to be Russian if the people want it, and they obviously do.

I think Buchanan sed something to this effect: Why should 230 million Americans pay to protect 350 million Europeans from 150 million Russians.

We need to get out of NATO. But, no, American foreign policy serves the strategic interests of Israel, and the selfish interests of the huge “privatization” special interests that profit off of Bush2′s privatization of the American military.

Defense is big business, and the Republican party supports big business, and the Wall Street banksters that profit off of the pain of the American middle class.